R.I.P. Tetris DS

Nintendo's Tetris DS server went offline today. It's still possible to experience online play if you hack a rom to point it to polaris instead of Nintendo's servers. But you have to play on a flashcart or emulator.

Anyone have any favourite TDS moments? I remember all the initial hype in the early weeks where the main good players were all TGM players, particularly I remember JIN8 and Mihara. I remember when caffeine recorded a match he played against Mihara, which caused Mihara to then rant on his blog about respecting the privacy of others or some shit.

All the TGM players set their names to TGM-<handle> to show their heritage. And later some good non-TGM players set their name to TCM-<handle> to parody that. It stood for "the chicken masters", lol.

I remember when me and a friend were training the night before a tournament. We played for hours and hours. Just against each other. I think we played first to 10 wins for each session. And then I think he had 9-1 or something crazy like that and then I go on to win it.

Tetris DS was my first foray into competitive Tetris and was what brought me here in the first place.

I still remember fondly when I beat my first (and only) cheater in classic 1vs1. He/She named him/herself Lucky-✩ and used the "permanant star" cheat, where you get infinite I pieces. My speed and limited knowledge of t-spin double prevailed that day.

The public SSL certs for the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection are hard encoded into each ROM, and will only accept connections from servers using the private SSL cert. It's not like we didn't see this coming. The private SSL cert is set to expire in 2015 anyways. If Nintendo didn't shut down the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection now, then it would have just died on its own.

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So, I think a flash cart or some sort of patching device would be a requirement for private server play.

All the TGM players set their names to TGM-<handle> to show their heritage. And later some good non-TGM players set their name to TCM-<handle> to parody that. It stood for "the chicken masters", lol.

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My understanding from mask was that it wasn't because they were non-TGM players. It was just to poke fun at how they were scared of playing in case they lost their rating.

My highlights would probably be breaking into the top 50, the days of blockstats and the IRC channel that it had, and playing against jin8/TGM-HOLiC and NOAH a couple of times in 4-player public matches (and also a few times in private).

RIP Tetris DS online. Really enjoyed it, despite the shitty matchmaking system and the fact it took a good ten minutes or more each to find 4p games once you got to 7500+ ratings, and that you needed an unencrypted or WEP wifi connection to actually play at all. Had a lot of fun and almost certainly wouldn't be here or know any of you guys if I hadn't gotten quite so addicted to 4p.

Am kind of surprised they've kept it going until now. Wish they'd kept the same longevity for the online leaderboards, which broke and stayed broken after a couple of months and that pretty much killed the competitive aspect of public rating.

The public SSL certs for the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection are hard encoded into each ROM, and will only accept connections from servers using the private SSL cert. It's not like we didn't see this coming. The private SSL cert is set to expire in 2015 anyways. If Nintendo didn't shut down the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection now, then it would have just died on its own.

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The nerd in me wonders if the game would actually check the certificate expiry date. The DS does have a clock but if the cert is hard-coded there's not much point in checking these details beyond a rigged self-destruct date.

Still, that's very disappointing. Once again pirates get the better product.

There was a video I had of myself playing against him (and I think jin8 too). Ironically I don't have it any more because my YouTube account was deleted after multiple takedown requests from Arika for my TGM/Texmaster videos...

I never had the pleasure of playing online. I did, however, feel like a beast once I mastered playing the game at 20G. I managed to get to like level 80 or so. I even thought I was good enough to go for the world record, until I learned that the game counter stopped. Sadly, I had to sell it.